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I.AFCADIO HEARN 



LAFCADIO HEARN 



By 

EDWARD THOMAS 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1912 



•J'S 



1^ 



T^ 



BUTLER & Tanner, 

The selwood printing Works» 

frome, and london. 






THE BARD GWILI 



, ABBREVIATIONS 

B, I. and II. . Vol. I. and II. of Miss Bisland's 
Lafcadio Hearn. Life and Let- 
ters (Houghton Mifflin and 
Constable). 

B. III. . . Miss Bisland's Lafcadio Hearn : 
Japanese Letters (Houghton 
Mifflin and Constable). 

N Mr. Yone Noguchi's Lafcadio 

Hearn in Japan (Elkin Ma- 
thews). 

G.M.G, . . Dr. G. M. Gould's Concerning 
Lafcadio Hearn (G. W. Jacobs 
and Fisher Unwin). 

T.J, , . . Professor Basil Hall Chamber- 
lain's Things Japanese (John 
Murray). 

L.B. . . . Letters from the Raven (Brent&no's 
and Constable). 

CO. . . . Some Chinese Ghosts (Little 
Brown and Kegan Paul) . 

C.N. . . . One of Cleopatra's Nights (Bren- 
tano's). 

C Chita (Harpers). 

F.Wtl, . . Two Years in the French West 
Indies (Harpers). 

O Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan 

(Houghton Mifflin and Kegan 
Paul). 

7 



ABBREVIATIONS 

O Out of the East (Houghton 

Mifflin and Kegan Paul). 
K Kohoro (Houghton Mifflin and 

Kegan Paul). 
B.F. ... Gleanings in Buddha Fields 

(Houghton Mifflin and Kegan 

Paul). 
E, and R, . . Exotics and Retrospectives (Little 

Brown and Kegan Paul). 
O.J. , . . In Ghostly Japan (Little Brown 

and Kegan Paul). 
S. . m . . Shadowings (Little Brown and 

Kegan Paul). 
J.M. , . » A Japanese Miscellany (Little 

Brown and Kegan Paul). 
Kot. . . . Kotto (MacmiUan Co.). 
Kw. . . . Kwaidan (Houghton Mifflin 'and 

Kegan Paul). 
J. . . . • Japan : an attempt at Interpre- 
tation (MacmiUan Co.). 
M.W. . . . The Milky Way (Houghton 

Mifflin and Constable). 

Note. — I thank the publishers of these books for 
their permission to make the quotations from them 
which are indicated in the text. 



In one of his last essays Lafcadio Hearn 
said that he would like to be buried in the 
old Buddhist graveyard behind his garden. 
He liked the place for its beauty and anti- 
quity, and for its great bell. This bell had 
" a quaintness of tone which wakens feel- 
ings, so strangely far away from all the 
nineteenth century part of me, that the 
faint blind stirrings of them, make one 
afraid — deliciously afraid " : ^ it caused " a 
striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part 
of my ghost — a sensation as of memories 
struggling to reach the light beyond the 
obscuration of a million million deaths and 
births." It is a thought easily to be paral- 
leled in any of his books. More than any 
other man he appears to have been unable 
to forget " the dark backward and abyss " 
of his own immemorial past. " Is not 
every action indeed the work of the Dead 

1 Kw. 212. 




LAFCADIO HEARN 

who dwell within us ? " " is a sentence which 
shows what governed his thinking. He 
himself knew less of his immediate ancestors 
than most men, but though he would not 
have expected any great illumination from 
a far fuller knowledge he was fond of dwel- 
ling upon his childhood and origin. How 
much he knew of them is uncertain. What 
he has said and what others have unearthed 
amounts to little — a suggestive and sur- 
prising little, though not enough to satisfy 
the man who was so impressed by the con- 
tinual resurrection of the past, that he 
found the worship of ancestors " an 
extremely righteous thing." ^ The Hearns 
are said to have been a Dorsetshire family 
with " a tradition of gipsy blood," * but 
settled since the end of the seventeenth 
century in Ireland. The head of the family 
was then Dean of Cashel. He had eight 
sons who were soldiers, and of these one 
was Hearn's grandfather. His father was 
Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, who 
fell in love with a Greek girl, Rosa Cerigote, 
while he was in garrison, carried her off 
and married her. Lafcadio, named from 

» G. 396. * B. II. 28. « B. I. 5. 

10 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

the island of his birth, Lefcada, was the 
second, but first surviving, child, born on 
June 27, 1850 : his infant speech was 
Romaic and Italian. Surgeon-Major Hearn 
took his family to Ireland six » years later, 
and soon afterwards his wife ran away from 
him or Ireland, never to return. He 
married again and Lafcadio, being adopted 
by a great-aunt, never saw father or mother 
after the age of seven. He remembered 
that his mother was small, black-haired and 
black-eyed, and that only once did he feel 
glad with his father. He favoured his 
mother, and sometimes thought there was 
nothing in him, physical or mental, of his 
father ; but Miss Bisland says that the 
children of his father's second wife were 
much like Lafcadio,* with "dark skins, 
delicate aquiline profiles, eyes deeply set in 
arched orbits, and short, supple, well-knit 
figures." 5 He himself said that he got his 
impatience, sensitiveness and affection from 
his mother, and what pride and persistence 
he had from his father. 

The great-aunt who adopted Hearn was 
a Mrs. Brenan, " widow of a wealthy Irish- 

5 B. I. 11. 
II 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

man, by whom she had been converted to 
Romanism." Hearn himself is the only 
authority for what we learn of his life with 
her, in Wales and Ireland, and what he has 
said is often in a heightened tone which 
suggests a considerable developing process, 
conscious or not. He says that he was 
" brought up in a rich home, surrounded 
with every luxury." He has recalled, in 
Kwaidan, the witchcraft of a Welsh or gypsy 
harper playing and singing to him ; and 
in " My Guardian Angel " ^ how when he 
was " nearly six " a cousin made him 
" unhappy in a new and irreparable way," ' 
by teaching him about Hell ; in " Night- 
mare-touch " how his fear of darkness was 
cruelly overridden ; ^ and in " Idolatry " 
how he got to know the Greek mythology, 
and had an intuition " that the gods had 
been belied because they were beautiful," 
and how they made his world glow again and 
so absorbed him that his elders excised the 
breasts of the nude female figures and 
concealed some lines with cross-strokes of 
the pen, and others with bathing drawers. 
These autobiographical voluntaries are in 

6 B. I. 16. ' B. I. 27, » S. 238. 

12 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

keeping Avith Hearn's belief that he was 
" Of a meridional race ... a Greek," who 
felt rather with the Latin than the Anglo- 
Saxon. He boasted also of being, as a small 
boy, very mischievous and fond of kissing 
beautiful girls, and later of desiring the love 
of succubi. 

In " Nightmare Touch " he speaks of 
being at a " children's boarding school,"~ 
of which we know nothing more. He says 
that he " passed some years in Catholic 
colleges " ^ but was not a Catholic. He 
may have been at a " Jesuit college in the 
north of France," and was certainly at 
Ushaw, a Roman Catholic school at Dur- 
ham. Here he is remembered to have 
" announced his disbelief in the Bible," 
and is described as a boy with a taste for 
drawing, fond of poetry and books of travel 
and adventure, " very much in earnest," 
sensitive, and " a very lovable character, 
extremely sympathetic and sincere." He 
speaks himself of having a " religious 
tutor," and though he told his brother he 
was not a Catholic he told the unknown of 
his " Letters to a Lady " that he " was once 

9 B. I. 33. 
13 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

a Catholic — at least, my guardians tried to 
make me so. . . ." Evidently he liked 
to dwell upon his sufferings and rebellions. 
In " Gothic Horror " ^° he describes his 
ghostly fear in an old church ; in a letter 
to Professor Chamberlain ^^ his fear of 
ghosts and his crying loudly at the sound 
of a tune played " in the midst of a fashion- 
able gathering." Whether it is due or not 
to unconscious literary influence, his recol- 
lections of childhood remind us of De 
Quincey's autobiography, as some of his 
later recollections recall the " Confes- 
sions." 

He is supposed to have left Ushaw after 
and in consequence of an accident which 
blinded one eye. He was already " very 
near-sighted " and when he was only eight, 
says Dr. Gould, the right eyeball so con- 
spicuous in his portraits was " about as 
large and protruding as in later life." ^^ it 
is not known what happened to him during 
the next three years. He says that his rich 
relatives refused to pay anything to help 
him to finish his education, that he had to 
become a servant, and that he spent two 

" S. 213. " B. III. 212. '2 B I 37, 

14 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

years of sickness in bed. A schoolfellow 
has said that Hearn suffered extreme 
poverty in London, and in a fragment 
called " Stars " he has described himself 
sleeping in a hayloft for the sake of heat 
from the breath of horses below. On the 
other hand he told his friend, Mr. Watkin, 
that he had " dissipated ten years in Latin 
and Greek, and stuff." ^^ 

When he was nineteen it is certain that 
he was penniless in New York, and in the 
same year, 1869, working in Cincinnati for 
a Syrian pedlar, then as a typesetter and 
proof-reader. He earned the name of 
" Old Semicolon " by his exceptional care 
for what seemed to him right in printing. 
In 1874 he was a general reporter on the 
Inquirer at Cincinnati.^* He advanced 
from market reports to descriptions of a 
murder and of Cincinnati as seen from the 
top of St. Peter's Cathedral spire, where 
he was hauled by a steeple- jack. He was 
hardworking and sat for hours at his table, 
" his great bulbous eyes resting as close to 
the paper as his nose would permit." 
Sometimes there were fourteen or fifteen 

" L. R. 108. 1* B. I. 50, 83. 

16 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

pages by him in one number of the Inquirer. 
He also worked for the Commercial, but 
is said to have been discharged because he 
sought a licence for an open marriage with 
a coloured woman. He haunted dark 
corners of the city and knew the plegroes. 
He also made friends with a musical critic, 
an artist, and a printer. The printer, Mr. 
Watkin, called him the Raven on account 
of his black hair and his love of gloom, 
horror, and Edgar Allan Poe. Little of his 
writing belonging to this period is known. 
He edited and for the most part wrote a 
comic and satiric Sunday paper, called Ye 
Giglampz. Here he was writing on subjects 
and in a tone so unsuitable that he is said 
to have done nothing worth reading. He 
has, however, been praised for the descrip- 
tion in the Commercial of a murdered and 
burnt corpse. Such description awakens 
chiefly surprise that a man who pushed his 
finger into a boiled human brain to learn its 
consistency should have troubled the same 
hand with a pen. It is imcertain whether 
the adventure was due to natural curiosity 
or to a literary pursuit of the unusual and of 
words to suit it. In the small hoxu-s " after 
16 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

the rough work of the police rounds "!*• 
he was translating Gautier, and One of 
Cleopatra's Nights, published in 1882, is 
said to belong to this period. 

Apparently the negress was not the only 
subject of difference between him and 
Cincinnati, and in 1877 he left it for New 
Orleans. On the way he spent some time 
at Memphis, staying in " a great big 
dreary room," of a " great dreary house," ^* 
which he describes so as to create an impres- 
sion like that of the house in Greek Street 
where De Quincey lodged. The dead bells 
had been ringing for a general's funeral, 
and he cried " a good deal of nights," he 
says, as he did when " a college boy returned 
from vacation." 

Arriving at New Orleans he was very poor, 
but he seems for the first time to have been 
at home in a city which was " the paradise 
of the South " — ^he said, " I never beheld 
anything so beautiful and so sad." He felt 
that he could never leave it for the North, 
so much did he feel its age, its forsaken state- 
liness, and its quiet. That he would not stay 
in it for ever was clear from his heart " like a 

16 B. I. 61. 16 L.R. 36. 

17 B 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrat- 
ing season." He would like to be a swal- 
low with " a summer nest in the ear of an 
Egyptian colossus or a broken capital of 
the Parthenon." He still contributed to 
the Commercial, chiefly letters that were 
unprofitably picturesque : they are to be 
found in Letters from the Raven over the 
signature of " Ozias Midwinter." He tried 
to make money by setting up a five-cent 
eating house. At one time he thought of 
going to Japan — " splendid field in Japan." 
But he found journalistic work on the 
Daily Item, reading proofs, writing edi- 
torials and occasionally a translation or 
original sketch. In 1881 the Times-Demo- 
crat of New Orleans gave him work and a new 
opportunity, by printing week after week 
his translations from Gautier, Maupassant, 
Pierre Loti. About two hundred of these 
translations appeared. He contributed 
also other translations and many studies 
and stories. His three books. One of 
Cleopatra's Nights, Stray Leaves from Strange 
Literature, and Some Chinese Ghosts, were 
all collected from the Times-Democrat. 
He was getting older, " less despondent but 
18 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

less hopeful . . . more systematic and per- 
haps a good deal more selfish. Not strictly 
economical, but coming to it steadily, and 
in leisure hours studying the theories of 
the East, the poetry of antique India," 
About 1884 he was to meet the First Prin- 
ciples of Herbert Spencer, which gave him 
" unspeakable comfort " and an " eternal 
reopening of the Great Doubt," made 
pessimism " ridiculous " and taught " a 
new reverence for all kinds of faith." 

New Orleans was the first step towards 
Japan. The second was the West Indies. 
In 1884 he visited Grande Isle in the Gulf 
of Mexico, a tropical island which inspired 
his romance called Chita, and made him 
say that " One lives here. In New Orleans 
one only exists." The chapters of this 
book as they appeared in the Times- 
Democrat, helped him to a commission 
from Messrs. Harper which took him in 
1887 to the Windward Islands and to 
British Guiana. His travel-sketches ap- 
peared in Harper^s Magazine. After an 
interval of only two months he returned to 
St. Pierre in Martinique. His love for the 
tropics was so strong that he wrote from 
19 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

Japan in 1890 expressing a hope that in a 
year or two he could earn enough to 
" reahze his dream of a home in the West 
Indies." ^^ He thought that his real field 
was in the Latin countries, and his dream 
was " to haunt the old crumbling Portuguese 
and Spanish cities, and steam up the 
Amazon or Orinoco, and get romances no- 
body else could find." ^^ The dream is elo- 
quently expressed in his Two Years in the 
French West Indies and his letters. In 
1887 he half believed that he was returning 
to the tropics for ever. He was weary of 
the whole Anglo-Saxon system of life and 
civilization. When he was back in New 
York in 1889 he wanted to get back " among 
the monkeys and the parrots, under a 
violet sky among green peaks and an eter- 
nally lilac and luke-warm sea — where cloth- 
ing is superfluous and reading too much 
of an exertion — ^where everybody sleeps 
14 hours out of the 24," as in Japan he 
envied a friend " the rich, divine, moist, life- 
sapping and life-giving heat of the tropics " ; 
and this, in spite of " the development of 
morbid nervous sensibility to material 

^'' L, R. 93. 18 B. I. 105. 

20 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

impressions, and absolute loss of thinking 
power, accompanied by numbing and cloud- 
ing of memory." He declared that white 
faces became " ghostly terrible " ^* to him, 
and he felt the " black man's terror of the 
white." In New York he was working at 
his translation of Le Crime de Sylvestre 
Bonnard for purposes of immediate gain. 
Then he accepted an offer to go to Japan 
and write articles on his journey for Messrs. 
Harper. He left on May 8, 1890. He threw over 
his journalistic work and became a school- 
master, teaching English thenceforward with 
a short interval, until the year before his 
death. In less than nine months after 
leaving New York he had married a Japan- 
ese vnie. By her he had two sons, and he 
enjoyed a home life of great sweetness and 
tranquillity. Among Japanese he could 
pass as only ''a curious-looking" Japanese 
from some remote part of the empire ; and 
he soon learned to squat instead of sitting. 
In 1896 he became a Japanese citizen. 
Now and then he thought of journeys to far 
countries, and just before his death he was 
thinking of going to the United States to 

" B. III. 271. 
21 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

lecture. But except that he was forced 
by the cold climate to leave a congenial 
place, Matsue, he suffered only the troubles 
of every author who is not an exemplary 
pachyderm : "At home," he said, " every- 
thing is sweet " ; and again : " It is a very 
gentle world. It is only happy when I am 
happy." He was not a born schoolmaster, 
nor continuously cheerful at the work, but 
he won affection, and his difficulties were 
noble and created by his own high standards. 
This work did not rob him of spirit to plan 
or strength to execute, and it gave him not 
only a sufficient wage, but opportunities. 
He saw many things which the professional 
author might have missed, and his students 
gave him direct help as well as indirect. 
His home life made him younger by taking 
away the youthful consciousness of age. 
When he sang a child's song, says Mrs. 
Hearn, " he looked as if he never knew the 
existence of the worries of the world." ^° 
Though getting grey at forty-three, he was 
much stronger than at thirty. He had 
begun by wishing to be reincarnated as a 
Japanese baby, had passed through a period 

20 N. 57. 
22 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

when Japan gave him no thrill and he 
knew it, and had reached a deep studious 
and domestic ease. His Japanese books 
and letters are the sole and sufficient 
authority for these years from 1890 until 
his death in 1904. Hitherto he had been 
experimenting and choosing his material 
quite consciously and elaborating it quite 
consciously. Now his material began to 
be so abundant and insistent that he might 
seem to be doing nothing but arrange it. 



23 



II 



Hearn was forty when he reached Japan. 
He had been drifting about the world, 
rather more obviously a pawn of circum- 
stances than other men. Nothing could 
stop him except sickness or poverty. He 
had made some friends and acquired some 
books, but there can have been few less 
substantial men than he. In his unfriendly 
way, due to his having heard that while 
Hearn was writing to him in love and trust 
he was speaking of him " with bitterness 
and malevolent injustice," Dr. Gould says 
that except in " the pursuit of literary 
excellence, Hearn had no character. His 
was the most unresisting, most echo-like 
mind I have ever known. He was a perfect 
chameleon ; he took for the time the colour 
of his surroundings." ^ This probably 
means little more than that Hearn was 
abashed before Dr. Gould, and was dimly 

1 G. M. G. 
24 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

aware of what the doctor thought of him. 
It was to Dr. Gould that Hearn said : 
" You have given me a soul " : it was of 
Dr. Gould that Hearn inquired, eagerly 
humbling himself : " If a man lives like a 
rat for twenty or twenty-five years he must 
have acquired something of the disposition 
peculiar to rodents, mustn't he " ? Yet 
even Dr. Gould, sadly compelled to accuse 
Hearn of having had " no romance, no 
love, no happiness, no interesting personal 
data upon which he could draw to give his 
imagination play, vividness, actuality, or 
even the semblance of reality," even Dr. 
Gould who lamented : " How often is the 
pathos of life sadly exaggerated by giving 
way to foolish, needless and degrading in- 
herited instincts at the expense of the higher 
life and usefulness," even Dr. Gould calls 
Hearn an " affectionate and sweet-natured 
man." This is the natural man in Dr. 
Gould confessing that Hearn had got char- 
acter. Along with this confession should 
be used Miss Bisland's statement that his 
physical cleanliness was like that of " un- 
contaminated savages and wild animals, 
which has the air of being so essential and 
25 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

innate as to make the best-groomed men 
and domesticated beasts almost frowzy by- 
contrast." 2 She calls him about five foot 
three in height, and unusually broad and 
powerful, but graceful and light in move- 
ment : others speak of his silent feline step. 
He calls himself a swarthy, very short, 
square- set fellow of about 140 pounds 
when in good health ; 36 1 inches round the 
chest : he afterwards became corpulent 
and stooped. He was shy, but composed 
and dignified, presumably when he was 
surrounded. He shrank from meetings 
and sometimes fled from them. He walked 
about as he talked, a habit which his elder son 
also had, " touching softly the furnishings 
of the room or the flowers of the garden," 
and he poured out " a stream of brilliant talk 
in a soft, half-apologetic tone, with con- 
stant deference to the opinions of his com- 
panions." . . . His head was " bold and 
delicate " in profile, though some thought 
the chin weak ; his brow " was square and 
full above the eyes," his complexion " a 
clear, smooth olive," or " a little brownish," 
and his skin " rather hairy." His large 

» B. I. 77. 
26 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

seeing eye was brown and heavily lashed ; 
the other was filmed or pearled, and was 
often concealed by his hand during con- 
versation. He was afraid that women 
were repelled by this eye, but though shy 
.with them was one who took " a foolish 
fancy to every damozel in his path." He 
used a handglass for near things and a tele- 
scope for distant ; otherwise, says Dr. 
Gould, " the world beyond a few feet was 
not a three dimensioned one ; it was 
coloured . . . but it was formless and flat, 
without much thickness or solidity, and 
almost without perspective." Dr. Gould 
believes that the result of this was " what 
it was," i.e. that in so far as what he saw 
was different from what other men saw it 
was due to the difference between his sight 
and other men's. Dr. Gould says nothing 
to explain Hearn's own statement : that 
" a landscape necessarily suggests less to 
the keen-sighted man than to the myope. 
The keener the view the less depth in the 
impression produced." It is true that 
Hearn dwelt much in his books upon 
physical appearances, but that was due in 
a large part to the literary influence of 
27 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

Gautier and others, and his power in this 
department is not so great as to suggest any 
useful peculiarity of vision. If anything, 
it has sometimes a bad effect, that of undue 
emphasis upon detail, which may have been 
due to seeing a thing or a group bit by bit 
instead of as a proportioned and related 
whole. Heat, he said, was good for his 
sight, and his sight thus chose his landscape. 
It also unfitted him for many forms of 
physical exercise. But he was a good 
swimmer and loved the water, and one of 
his best pictures of himself is in " At 
Yaidzu," ^ where he swims out at night 
to the fleet of tiny lighted ghost-ships after 
the Festival of the Dead, watching and 
questioning : 

" Are not we ourselves as lanterns 
launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, 
and ever separating further and further one 
from another as we drift to the inevitable 
dissolution . . . ? " 

He liked going to Yaidzu for his summer 
vacation, to swim and " rough it " among 
the fishermen. " He smoked incessantly," 
says Mrs. Hearn, " and he could not leave 

» G. J. 232. 
28 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

his cigar behind even while swimming " : * 
when he touched the shore by a paper 
lantern put to mark a landing spot " he was 
the happiest man alive." Mrs. Hearn saw 
in his smoking a religious act, and says : 
" I always wondered when I saw him 
smoking, what heavenly delight he felt with 
his pipe." ^ He began by living as a good 
appetite proposed, but became of necessity 
regular and careful, with very rare " de- 
baucheries of beefsteak, whiskey and lemon- 
ade, gin, ginger ale and beer." His letters 
express a somewhat unusual liveliness of 
delight in the company of men whom he 
was at ease with. " Loving thanks for 
yesterday's extraordinary enjoyableness 
and for all things," he writes to a friend in 
1898, and again : " I shall not thank you 
for my happy two days, and all the beau- 
tiful things that you ' so beautifully did.' 
But I felt as if the sky had become 
more blue . . . than could really be the 
case," and the phrases suggest a boyish 
love of being " treated." To the same 
friend he writes about " the most precious 
photographs," asks for " the one with the 

* N. 82. 5 N. 38, 

20 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

full dress hat on," and says : "I just love 
it. " ^ Twenty years before he had de- 
scribed himself in a letter to Mr. Watkin 
as feeling " a little blue and accordingly 
affectionate. ... I write extremely often 
because I feel alone and extremely alone. 
By and by, if I get well, I shall write only 
by weeks ; and with time perhaps only by 
months ; and when at last comes the rush 
of business . . . only by years — until the 
times and places of old friendship are for- 
gotten." ' It is certain that he did forget 
friends and probable that he did not make 
the customary efforts not to do so, being 
affectionate, quick and with no morbid or 
diffused sense of responsibility except to 
his family, himself and his work. Pro- 
fessor Chamberlain attributes his abrupt 
way of dropping friends to idealism : 
" Friends when he fkst made them were 
for him more than mortal men," and he 
" poured out at their feet all the passionate 
emotionalism of his Greek nature," but 
discovering feet of clay and resenting a 
difference from his philosophical opinions 
he turned away ; and he himself " was a 

6 B. II. 368, 375. ? l. R. 39. 

30 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

greater sufferer from all this than any one 
else ; for he possessed the affectionate 
disposition of a child." ^ 

Bound up with this quick passionateness 
was his sensitiveness, though sometimes 
his style exaggerates this, as when he says 
that the contemplation of the big book 
which might be written of incense is " terri- 
fying." He was, says his wife, " too 
enthusiastic for beauty, for which he wept, 
and for which he rejoiced, and for which 
he was angry." ^ His eyes wore " a look 
of fearful enthusiasm " as she told him ghost 
stories. The howling of a dog made him 
" indefinably, superstitiously afraid." ^" 
Sometimes his wife thought him mad, 
" because he saw things that were not and 
heard things that were not." ^^ As a child 
he had seen and felt " shadowy dark-robed 
figures, capable of atrocious self-distor- 
tion " ^2 and of thrilling him, with a " sort 
of abominable electricity." He sorrowed 
for the cutting down of trees. He was very 
tender with animals, particularly cats, and 
one cat was so delightful to him that he 

8 B. I. 59. 9 B. I. 145. lo Q. J. 135. 

" B. I. 153. 12 s. 14 

31 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

forgot the fleas of his lodging ; but he had 
no unusual sympathy with animals, or he 
would never have written of the " great 
fun " ^^ of feeding kites with " dead rats 
or mice which have been caught in traps 
over night and subsequently drowned." 

He had evidently been made to feel him- 
self an exceptional being. In 1892 he 
imagines his conscience saying to him, on 
the subject of a woman in a story : " Your 
ancestors were not religious people : you 
lack constitutional morality. That's why 
you are poor, and unsuccessful, and void 
of mental balance, and an exile in Japan. 
You know you cannot be happy in an 
English moral community. You are a 
fraud — a vile Latin — a vicious French- 
hearted scalawag ; " 14 and he cries : " Vive 
le monde antique.'^ Four years later he 
is saying that with an emotional nature a 
man is happier among Latins : "I confess 
that I can only bear the uncommon types 
of Englishmen, Germans and Americans — 
the conventional types simply drive me 
wild. On the other hand I can feel at 
home with even a villain, if he be Spaniard, 

13 G. 379. 1* B. II, 85. 

32 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

Italian, or French." ^^ He said that the 
English were " mere sucking babes in the 
knowledge of art as compared mth the 
Latins." ^^ He was often " hungry for a 
sensation," from a picture, a flower, a 
temple, or from a book which kept him 
from talking because he " wanted to enjoy 
the pleasure of the ghostly pain." ^' He 
was rather fond of describing himself as 
one of the " small people without great 
wills and great energies." But he suffered 
from melancholy and even from remorse. 
When he saw his wife suffering before the 
birth of the first child, he often begged her 
forgiveness for her suffering and said that 
he would " atone with his writing." ^^ 
He had sobered down, it may be, chiefly 
by the help of an instinctive feeling that 
his power must be concentrated upon his 
work, as that work became more clear to 
him. But he did not turn round upon 
himself. He thought in 1888, and con- 
tinued to think, that " what we term the 
finer moral susceptibilities signify a more 
complex and perfect evolution of purely 

15 B. II. 300. 13 B. III. 393. 

17 B. III. 60. 18 N.51. 

33 q 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

physical sensitiveness." In 1893 he wrote : 
" All this woman- worship and sex- worship 
is tending to develop to a high degree cer- 
tain moral qualities. As the pleasure of 
colour has been developed out of percep- 
tions created by appetite, so out of vague 
sense of physical charm a sense of spiritual 
charm is being evolved." ^^ He asked if a 
work of art ought not " to make us feel 
that there are things which it were beau- 
tiful to die for," but it must, he said, 
stir in us " the sensuous life . . . the life 
of desire." ^o jj^ thought sensualism good 
" because it softens," but also because it 
exists ; for he came more and more to see 
with equanimity the orchestration of all 
things to an infinite music, " every school 
contributing some tone, some colour — else 
unobtainable — ^to that mighty future scale 
of emotional harmonies of which the depths 
and the heights are still but faintly guessed 
at by us." ^i He told his Japanese pupils 
simply that the man of genius was one 
" in whom brain has been developed at the 
cost of body^n whom the nervous system 

19 B. ni. 80. 20 B. ni. xliv. 

21 B. III. 98. 

34 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

has a delicacy and a sensitiveness far beyond 
the average person. ... It is much more 
difficult^or him to control his feelings than 
it is for the average man, because his feelings 
are much stronger and because the control- 
ling machinery of will is less developed in 
him." 2^ This is the man who loved the 
tropics although, or because, they develop 
" morbid sensibility to material impres- 
sions and absolute lack of thinking power." 
Great heat made him feel young, and in 
1894 he said : " If I could be where it is 
always hot I think I should live to dry up 
and blow away." ^^ When a friend was 
suffering from depression and lassitude he 
sent him words of serious advice : "I 
would indulge myself if I were you ... I 
would give that digestion plenty of work 
with claret and beef and puddings and pies 
and liqueurs. And I would smoke cigars ; 
and I would drink brandy." Vive le 
monde antique ! It is not to be doubted 
that he reached middle age soon after Her- 
bert Spencer dissipated " that positive 
scepticism that imposes itself upon an 
undisciplined mind," ^^ and having said 
22 N. 23 B. in. 24 B. I 365. 

35 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

that he believes " the mass of humanity is 
good," he adds that " every man must so 
think who has suffered much and reached 
middle life." He came, by himself, to the 
conclusion that " there is no divine love 
save the love of man for man ; that we 
have no All-Father, no Saviour, no angel 
guardians ; that we have no possible refuge 
but in ourselves." ^^ 

25 0. 180. 



36 



Ill 



Hearn was a natural and prolific letter 
writer, and his letters from the beginning 
show him as an artist in his tastes and in 
his power to express and his desire to im- 
prove his power. It is not known how soon 
be began to think of himself as a writer. If 
he wrote verse as a boy it has disappeared, 
and his later verses prove that he had no 
gift. But as soon as his writing began to 
be printed and read it drew attention, be- 
cause it was the work of one who by natural 
feeling, as well as imitation, had developed 
his own standards, different from the 
common standards accepted by journalists 
at Cincinnati as everywhere else. He is 
said to have read poetry as a boy, and he 
continued to admire Longfellow and Tenny- 
son, and to think Swinburne " as to form," 
as he quaintly puts it, " the greatest nine- 
teenth century poet of England." He said 
that he liked, not Whitman, but what Whit- 
37 



LAFCADIO HEARN I 

man felt and failed in expressing. As for 
Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, he pre- 
ferred " Dobson, and Watson and Lang." 
But his remarks on poetry are almost 
enough to prove that English poetry meant 
little to him. He liked the foreign and the 
fantastic and the sensuous. He read 
Flaubert, Pierre Loti, Balzac's Contes Dro- 
laiiques, " Gautier's most pre-Raphael and 
wickedest work," ^ Swinburne, Poe, Rabe- 
lais, Aldrich, and " other odd books," 
— " an agglomeration of exotics and eccen- 
trics." 2 He wanted to get away from the 
life of everyday for stories : "I would give 
anything," he said in 1883, " to be a literary 
Columbus — to discover a Romantic America 
in some West Indian or North African or 
Oriental region. ... If I could only be- 
come a Consul at Bagdad, Algiers, Ispahan, 
Benares, Samarkand, Nippo, Bangkok, 
Ninh-Binh — or any part of the world 
where ordinary Christians do not like to 
go ! " ^ At one time he made up his mind 
to write once a month " the queerest and 
most outlandish fancy I can get up," in 
not more than two hundred words. In a 

1 L. R. 134. 2 B. I. 350. 3 B. I. 294. 
38 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

jest he proposed to his musical friend^ 
Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, books on the battle 
cries of all nations, on the manifestation of 
climatic influence in popular melody, on 
the music of nomad races, on the peculiar 
characteristic of erotic music in all countries, 
etc. He read the Indian epics. He must 
at one time have read and re-read De 
Quincey, but that writer apparently came 
to stand for something in his youth which 
he disliked, and by 1893 " De Quincey 's 
charm has for ever vanished " — Whittier's 
had increased, and Hearn was persuaded by 
him to a sympathy with religious emotions : 
"It is like hearing a great congregation 
singing, ' Nearer, my God, to thee.' " 

It is evident that Hearn began with the 
aim of saying strange things in an exquisite 
manner. This exquisite manner was to be f 
hunted and delved for. That it did not 
come by nature may be seen from phrases 
like " The liver had been simply roasted 
and the kidneys fairly fried," * or " If it 
be agreeable to you I will call upon you at 
1 p.m. on Sunday as per invitation." " 
This is from one of the " Letters to a Lady," 

* G. M. G. s L, E. 128. 

39 



LAFCADIO HEARN 



I 



wi'itten when he was twenty-five. He had 
then " not visited out since he was sixteen 
. . . had led a very hard and extra- 
ordinary Hfe previous to his connexion with 
the press — ^became a species of clumsy 
barbarian — and in short for various reasons 
considered myself ostracized, tabooed, out- 
lawed." ^ This was to explain that he 
was not used to " the cultivated class of 
people at all." His ^vriting, then, was 
likely to be founded entirely on books, and 
he would revolt as far as possible from the 
influence of the colloquial language to 
which he was used. Under the influence 
of Gautier and his " perfection of melody, 
warmth of word-colouring, voluptuous deli- 
cacy," "^ his " engraved gem-work of words," 
this became certain. In most of his letters 
to Mr. Watkin he was free from any such 
influence, but used only the words and 
phrases which were likely to come readily to 
his pen and made a style which was practi- 
cally Avritten speech, and slangy speech. 
In 1882 he begins a letter with : " Your 
letter lies before me here like a white tablet 

6 L. R. 129. 7 B. I. 269. 

40 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

of stone bearing a dead name ; and in my 
mind there is just such a silence as one feels 
standing before a tomb — so that I can press 
your hand only and say nothing." This 
is nothing like speech. He was then writing 
for the Times-Democrat of New Orleans 
translations from Maupassant, Jules Le- 
maitre, Pierre Loti, Flaubert, Hector Malot, 
Camille Flammarion, Dostoievsky, Sien- 
kiewicz, Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Matilde 
Serao, Tolstoy, Zola, Maxime du Camp, 
Coppee, Daudet, Baudelaire, and writing 
articles on Loti, on Arabian women, on 
the Roar of a Great City, etc. : he allowed 
a sentence of his deliberate style to enter a 
letter. His letters to Mr. Krehbiel had 
been a compromise or mixture of friendly 
speech and of writing elaborated for 
the benefit of a public in whom sympathy 
has to be created. It is a very attractive 
compromise, as in the description of his 
lodging in St. Louis Street, an old Creole 
house. ^ 

Sometimes he is not ashamed to forget 
his friend and imagine a public, which he 
harangues about " that religion of the 

8 B. I. 173. 
41 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

wilderness which flies to solitude, and hath 
no other temple than the vault of Heaven 
itself, painted with the frescoes of the 
clouds, and illuminated by the trembling 
tapers of God's everlasting altar, the stars 
of the firmament," ^ or he concludes with : 
" So I draw my chair closer to the fire, light 
up my pipe de terre Gambiere, and in the 
flickering glow weave fancies of palm trees 
and ghostly reefs and tepid winds, and a 
Voice from the far tropics calls to me across 
the darkness." ^° He wrote on musical 
instruments, on luxury and art in the time 
of Elegabalus ; he held it to be his 
" artistic duty " to let himself be " absorbed 
into the life " of the Latin city, to " study 
its form and colour and passion." There 
were, he said in 1882, months when he could 
not write ; when he could it was to " write 
a rough sketch and labour it over and over 
again for half a year, at intervals of ten 
minutes' leisure — sometimes I get a day 
or two." 1^ He foretold that he would 
always be " more or less Arabesque — cover- 
ing his whole edifice with intricate designs, 

8 B. I. 191. " B. I. 267. " B. I. 239. 
42 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

serrating his arches, and engraving mysti- 
cisms above the portals." 

It was in 1882 that he pubhshed, in a book 
which took its title from the first story, 
translations of Gautier's One of Cleopatra^s 
Nights, Clarimonde, Arria Mareella, The 
Mummifs Foot, Omphale, and King Can- 
daules. Three of these, he said, " rank 
among the most remarkable literary pro- 
ductions of the century." He wrote a 
warm-hearted dedication " to the lovers of 
the loveliness of the antique world, the 
lovers of physical beauty and artistic truth, 
of the charm of youthful dreams and young 
passion in its blossoming, of poetic ambi- 
tions and the sweet pantheism that finds 
all Nature vitalized by the spirit of the 
beautiful." A better translation is not 
likely to be made, because a man capable 
of doing it better would probably leave it 
alone and do original work. To those 
who already know the stories the transla- 
tions are interesting as Hearn's early prose, 
a cumbrous English stiffened with beauties 
which do not make it beautiful. It is un- 
wieldy but not massive, hard without being 
firm, and it is not alive. It is not Gautier 
43 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

and not Hearn, yet the more imposing parts 
of it became parts of Hearn, and he was to 
wi'ite many a sentence like : " She wore a 
robe of orange-red velvet, and from her 
wide ermine-lined sleeves there peeped forth 
patrician hands of infinite delicacy, and so 
ideally transparent that, like the fingers of 
Aurora, they permitted the sun to shine 
through them." ^- His next book, the 
Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures of 
1884, consisted of stories which were " re- 
constructions of what impressed me as most 
fantastically beautiful in the most exotic 
literature v/hich I was able to obtain," 
from the East and the West, but chiefly 
from the East. In the next year he pub- 
lished Ghomho Zhebes, a " Dictionary of 
Creole proverbs, selected from six Creole 
dialects, translated into French and Eng- 
lish with notes, complete index to subjects 
and some brief remarks upon the Creole 
idioms of Louisiana." 

In 1887 came Some Chinese Ghosts. 
Hearn calls them black lilies or phosphoric 
roses, and chose them for their " weird 
beauty." In several cases ten lines of an 

12 C. iV. 88. 
44 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

old unadorned legend was the origin of a 
tale of twenty pages. The Chinese outline 
was probably in every case a remarkable 
one, and such it is in Hearn. " The story 
of Ming-Y," for example, is of an immortal 
beauty. It is of a young tutor who met a 
beautiful woman in the woods and loved 
her and used to visit her beautiful palace 
instead of going home as he pretended. At 
last he was forced to confess. He showed 
his elders some of the gifts of his mistress 
and told them of her palace. The gifts 
seemed to have " lain buried in the earth for 
centuries " : as to the palace, there was no 
house in the place which he described, and 
the woman was unknown to them. They 
went to see and found only a tomb. Then 
they remembered the famous courtesan who 
was buried there long ago, and the city of 
her poet lover who gave her the gifts which 
she had given to the young man, and were 
all that he ever again saw of her, the lion 
of yellow jade, the brush case of carven 
agate, and the music. These stories are 
good enough to keep alive the book which 
contains them. But they are experiments, 
not master's work. Each story cost 
45 



LAFCADIO HEARN 



" months of hard work and study," as he 
has told us, and it can be believed ; for he 
adopted a style for them which had to be 
deliberately maintained. The style appar- 
ently did not grow out of his speech or his 
letters, but was a loftier ceremonious me- 
dium which became a second or a third 
nature. It cannot be analysed here suffi- 
ciently. But a few isolated points should 
be noticed and considered. Thus on page 
31 he speaks of " savage flowers," where he 
means " wild flowers " ; but " wild " was 
too familiar and he did not see, in his unreal 
tower of composition, that " savage " was 
a mere synonym and an unsuitable one. 
So on page 65 he calls the autumn light 
" aureate " for no better reason. In every 
story description abounds, and it is of such 
a kind that the words call attention to 
themselves, and are possibly admired, but 
ultimately fail to produce any effect beyond 
themselves. For example, in " the great 
citron-light of the sunset faded out," either 
the mind will think only of citrons, or it 
will painfully discover for itself a resem- 
blance between one of the sunset colours 
and the colour of a citron, leaving the words 
46 



I 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

of the writer a merely accurate statement 
incapable of producing a pure impression 
related to its context. This is far too often 
the reader's fortune. When he reads about 
an ear and a cheek in this style : " Othe jewel 
in her ear ! What lotus bud more dainty 
than the folded flower of flesh, with its 
dripping of diamond fire ! Again he saw 
it, and the curve of the cheek beyond, 
luscious to look upon as beautiful brown 
fruit," ^3 he finds it hard to think of human 
beauty, so confused is he by words and by 
flowers and fruit. The utmost reward of 
such writing is an admiration near akin to 
fatigue, and more often we feel that the 
writer has forgotten the woman and lost 
any possible power to suggest her by the 
time he has decided upon the sentence : 
" All suddenly he felt glide about his necl^ 
the tepid smoothness of a woman's arm." 
Such writing fails because it is dictated by 
an ideal that is not deep enough in the 
writer's spirit, the ideal of " one thing, one 
word " — one word chosen deliberately as if it 
were dead and still and powerless to re- 
taliate and live alone. Much of Hearn's 

" G, G. 122. 
47 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

care must have gone to make the eloquence 
of his opening and dosing sentences, like : 
" Thrice had spring perfumed the breast 
of the land with flowers, and thrice had 
been celebrated that festival of the dead 
which is called Siu-fan-ti, and thrice had 
Tong swept and garnished his father's tomb 
and presented his five-fold offerings of fruits 
and meats." ^* The pity of it is that such 
eloquence rarely has any natural sweet 
cadence, and Hearn's has not. When he 
wrote a letter about something he cared for 
and understood, his words had a flow which 
was inseparable from their sense ; but in 
this entirely self-conscious writing the spirit 
is never free to make music, or if one good 
cadence emerges the next will clash with 
it. Where this curious writing is most 
successful is in catalogues, such as this 
from the " Tale of the Porcelain God " : 
" The vases with orifices belled like the cups 
of flowers, or cleft like the bills of birds, 
or fanged like the jaws of serpents, or 
pink-lipped as the mouth of a girl ; the 
vases flesh-coloured and purple-veined and 
dimpled, with ears and with ear-rings ; the 

" G. a. 81. 

48 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

vases in likeness of mushrooms, of lotus- 
flowers, of lizards, of horse-footed dragons 
woman-faced ; the vases strangely trans- 
lucid, that simulate the white glimmering 
of grains of prepared rice, that counterfeit 
the vapory lace-work of frost, that imitate 
the efflorescences of coral." ^^ Life is not 
expected in a catalogue ; connexion is 
unnecessary ; and blind attention to iso- 
lated detail can work no harm. Hearn 
knew this : his books are full of such cata- 
logues and they were sometimes useful 
receptacles for the products of his games of 
skill with words. 

The effect of Chinese Ghosts is therefore 
a mixed one : the story and the treatment 
are always separable. Hearn's contribu- 
tion is decoration. He overlays the simple 
and beautiful outline though without con- 
cealing it. According to the reader's power 
of enjoying words that are without a spirit 
will be his enjoyment of the tales as a whole. 
He will be continually in the neighbour- 
hood of the spirit of beauty, as in " The 
Story of Ming-Y," but he will be aware that 
Hearn who found the beauty also caged it, 

16 C. O. 153. 

49 D 



LAFCADIO HEARN 



I 



with words pretending to be equivalent to 
things as well as more than names. 

Two long stories followed in 1889 and 
1890, Chita and Youma. They belong to 
the same period of his art as Chinese Ghosts, 
They are beautiful stories full of beautiful 
elements, but the treatment is the conspicu- 
ous thing. There is the story and there is the 
eloquent description of tropical nature, not 
exactly separable but not perfectly united 
by the mind which loved them both. 
Chita, for example, contains much mere 
eyesight and unvitalized notes of descrip- 
tion, sometimes in the favourite form of a 
catalogue. The writing tends constantly 
towards a superhuman level of eloquence, 
such as may be indicated by the passage : 
" But she saw and heard and felt much of 
that which, though old as the heavens and 
the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally 
young with the holiness of beauty — eter- 
nally mystical and divine — eternally weird : 
the unveiled magnificence of Nature's 
moods — ^the perpetual poem hymned by 
wind and surge — ^the everlasting splendour 
of the sky." ^^ It is relevant to ask why 

16 C. 148-9. 
50 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

he should have dragged the girl Chita into 
such description of what he admired in 
nature. But even when he has not the 
excuse of writing about Nature in her 
augustness, he makes the same ceremonious 
approach to his subject, as in " the pro- 
gressively augmenting v/eariness of lessons 
in deportment, in dancing, in music, in the 
impossible art of keeping her dresses un- 
ruffled and unsoiled." He translates " On 
with the dance " into " Better to seek 
solace in choregraphic harmonies, in the 
rhythm of gracious motion and of perfect 
melody." ^^ Much of the description of 
beautiful things is nearly as good as possible 
of its kind, and the rhapsodies are likely to 
interest and charm students of the elo- 
quence of Browne, De Quincey or Ruskin. 
But its power is halved because the writer 
has not chosen the right opportunity for 
such exercises, and exercises they remain, 
instead of essential elements in a work of 
art. The book is not without humanity, 
but the attitude towards human things, the 
most tragic and the most simple, is usually 
spectatorial He describes, for example, 

" O. 
51 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

the jetsam of a storm which destroyed an 
island and all its holiday population : the 
sheep, casks, billiard tables, pianos, chil- 
dren's toys, clothes, and dead bodies. The 
impression given by the passage is that 
Hearn had never got beyond the point of 
view that this scene was a good subject for 
description. He was writing as a detached 
aesthetic artist and this cold figure is as con- 
spicuous as the storm and its havoc. In 
a different key is the description of yellow 
fever which ends the book. Hearn himself 
had nearly died of the disease in New 
Orleans : in Chita it kills a man but it 
gives some life to the style, because the 
author is writing of what he knows and has 
mastered too well to regard it as a subject 
for decoration, or for felicities like " the 
stridulous telegraphy of crickets," and *' a 
soporific murmur made of leaf-speech and 
the hum of gnats." The whole book was 
the work of twelve months, and he calls it 
himself a " philosophic romance " ^^ meant 
to reach " that something in the reader 
which they call Soul, God, or the Unknow- 
able, according as the thought harmonizes 

" B, I. 406. 
52 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

with Christian, Pantheistic, or Spencerian 
ideas without conflicting with any." 

His descriptive skill and enthusiasm 
found a perfect outlet in his Two Years in 
the French West Indies of 1890. Here it 
was his business to describe what he saw. 
The book contains pictures of Nature and 
of ^egro and Creole life in Martinique, and 
stories. Of the long " Midsummer Trip 
to the Tropics " he says that " in spite of 
sundry justifiable departures from simple 
note-making, this paper is offered only as an 
effort to record the visual and emotional 
impressions of the moment." Sometimes 
he gives mere notes like : " Sixth day out. 
Wind tepid and still stronger, but sky very 
clear. An indigo sea, with beautiful white- 
caps. The ocean colour is deepening ; it 
is very rich now, but I think less wonderful 
than before ; — it is an opulent pansy hue 
Close by the ship it looks black-blue — the 
colour that bewitches in certain Celtic 
eyes." i^ At other times he finishes a little 
picture in two sentences like : " The 
steamer's wake is a great broad, seething 
river of fire — white like strong moonshine : 

'» F. W. I. 
63 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

the glow is bright enough to read by. At 
its centre the trail is brightest ; towards 
either edge it pales off cloudily, curling like 
smoke of phosphorus." 20 The method is 
admirably suited to travel sketches written 
on the spot for a magazine. In the stories 
he still gives too much space to description, 
but " Ti Canotie," for example, is not 
spoilt by a too exalted inanner. He is 
lively and intelligent in his account of the 
character of the coloured woman and its 
development through generations of prosti- 
tution. He is best of all in expressing the 
charm of Nature and the people, the love- 
liness and the languor ending in dread of 
activity and weakening of memory. " Pa 
combine, che ! " (" Do not think, dear ! ") 
is the warning of a coloured girl to a con- 
valescent European in one of the stories, 
and it ends : 

" She slipped an arm about his neck. 

" ' Doudoux,' she persisted — and her voice 
was a dove's coo — ' Si ou ainmein moin, 
pa combine, — non ! ' 

" And in her strange exotic beauty, her 
savage grace, her supple caress, the velvet 

2« F. W. 1. 
54 



i 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

witchery of her eyes — ^it seemed to me that 
I beheld a something imaged, not of herself, 
not of the moment only — a something 
weirdly sensuous ; the spirit of tropic 
Nature made golden flesh, and murmuring 
to each lured wanderer : ' If thou wouldst 
love me, do not think ! ' " 21 

Hearn himself did not weary *' of 
watching this picturesque life — of studying 
the costumes, brilliant with butterfly 
colours — ^and the statuesque semi-nudity of 
labouring hundreds — and the untaught grace 
of attitudes — and the simplicity of manners." 
The necessity of writing more rapidly than 
usual gave a fluency which was beneficial to 
his exuberant picturesqueness, in spite of 
the use of " minuscule " as a synonym for 
" very small " and the inversion of " changes 
extraordinary," and similar signs of care. 

Just before going to Japan, and " in sore 
distress for money," he wrote his translation 
of Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard in a few 
weeks. Everything in his first day in 
Japan was " unspeakably pleasurable and 
new," and he was not offended by the 
" shop of American sewing-machines next 

21 F. W. 1. 
55 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

to the shop of a Buddhist image maker '* 
in Yokohama. His eyes were delighted, 
his mind at ease : asked by a temple 
attendant if he was a Christian he said : 
"No," and to " Are you a Buddhist ? " 
replied " Not exactly." 22 He was at the 
school in Matsue — ^Matsue, the " chief city 
of the province of the Gods " — in August, 
1890, after a period of " living in temples 
and old Buddhist cemeteries, making pil- 
grimages and sounding enormous bells 
and worshipping astounding Buddhas," 23 
and making the acquaintance of Professor 
Basil Hall Chamberlain, author of Things 
Japanese. He began writing at once, 
recording his " First Day in the Orient," 
contributing essays to the Atlantic Monthly 
in 1891 and onwards, and publishing his 
first Japanese book. Glimpses of Unfamiliar 
Japan, in 1894. 

The change of life was like " escaping 
from an almost unbearable atmospheric 
pressure into a rarefied, highly oxygenated 
medium." 24 He found it partly a gain that 
" in Japan the law of life is not as with us 
— that each one strives to expand his own 

"(?. 8. " B. II. 5. 24 B. I. 35. 

56 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

individuality at the expense of his neigh- 
bour's " ; but partly a loss, because there 
was " never a fine inspiration, . . . never 
a thrill." Therefore, he said, literary 
work was " dry, bony, hard, dead work." ^^ 
It is more likely that his discomfort was 
due to the inevitable straining effort to 
come rapidly to terms with a life so different 
in detail and in the whole. He came to 
doubt whether the development of the 
individuality in a community was a " lofty 
or desirable " ^^ tendency, but also to 
suspect that that " depth does not exist in 
the Japanese soulstream." He felt that 
he would " never get close to the men." 
He discovered " how utterly dead Old 
Japan is, and how ugly New Japan is 
becoming." *' 

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan consists 
chiefly of descriptions of visible things — 
people, customs, dresses, gardens, shrines, 
and gods, seen at home or on travel. 
There are also stories outlined or elaborated, 
and essays like those on lovers' suicides, 
and the Japanese smile, and extracts direct 
from his diary as a teacher. His " un- 

2« B. I. 35. " B. I. 40. " B. II 223. 
57 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

familiar " Japan was that of the mass not 
yet Europeanized, " the great common 
people, who represent in Japan, as in all 
countries, the national virtues, and who 
still cling to their delightful old customs, 
their picturesque dresses, their Buddhist 
images, their household shrines, their beau- 
tiful and touching worship of ancestors." ^^ 
His sympathy was extreme. He was one 
who not merely felt " the divine in all 
religions," ^9 but thought Christianity far 
more irrational than Buddhism. He saw 
in a figure of the god Jizo a dream " more 
sweet than any imaged Christ," as well as 
a work of art so charming that he felt " a 
pain at being obliged to pass it by," that 
" playfellow of dead children." =^o When 
a missionary had told one of Hearn's pupils 
that the Japanese were savages, he an- 
swered : "I think, my dear lad, that he 
himself was a savage — a vulgar, ignorant, 
savage bigot. I think it is your highest 
social duty to honour your Emperor. . . . 
I think it is your duty to respect the gods 
of your fathers, the religion of your coun- 
try — even if you yourself cannot believe all 

28 G. viii. " Q^ y^ so Q^ 48. 

58 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

that others beheve." If the multitude and 
strangeness of things at times confused his 
sense of form, they had also touched his 
gravity as well as his curiosity, so that the 
book is incomparably richer than its pre- 
decessors. He had now to -write to give 
information and this checked his eloquence. 
He had little room for rhapsody, even if he 
had felt sufficiently at ease for it, though 
he was like his native neighbours in at 
least one characteristic : that they " make 
pilgrimages not more for the sake of pleasing 
the gods than of pleasing themselves by 
the sight of rare and pretty things." He 
travelled to Oki, where not even a mis- 
sionary had been. The light of Japan, as 
" gentle as the light of dreams," and " the 
all-temperate world " of men and Nature, 
sobered him after the garish tropics. He 
tells us that he came " to understand the 
unspeakable loveliness of a solitary spray 
of blossoms arranged as only a Japanese 
expert knows how to arrange it," ^^ and 
to admire it far above that " vulgar mur- 
dering of flowers," the Western bouquet. 

31 G. 345. 
59 



I 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

" Gentler and kindlier faces " he never 
saw than among the people who bowed in 
apology even while gazing at the foreigner. 
In his own writing moderation, gentle- 
ness and kindliness are certainly more 
noticeable than before. Descriptions of 
new things, by a man who had probably to 
use everything that he saw and could not 
afford to pick and choose, could hardly be 
better done. There are still catalogues, 
but used with a purpose, not merely to give 
an excuse for artfully enumerating precious 
or strange objects. He can be dull — how 
could he not be at such a task ? Yet 
aiming as he does at fulness and accuracy, 
not at impressions and finished pictures, 
he not only charms us by bringing charming 
things before us, but by his own modesty 
and grace. There are some wildernesses 
of adjectives ; there is a page where he 
uses " dwarf," " miniature," " microscopic," 
" tiny " and " lilliputian " in turn ; there 
are some pomposities like " solemn, pro- 
found, mighty," " colossal, severe, superb " ; 
and there is the phrase " mesmeric lentor." 
There are also a thousand tender, lovely, 
or grim things described in such a way 
60 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

that the reader feels himself to have been 
all but naturalized. 

In Out of the East, which followed in 
1895, the disturbance of initiation had 
ceased, and the first delight. There is very- 
little description and less rhapsody. Hearn 
thinks more and uses the note book less. 
He is observing principles and tendencies, 
beginning to generalize and compare. The 
sub-title of the book is : " Reveries and 
Studies in New Japan." The " beautiful 
illusion " of Japan had faded out in five 
years and he " had learned to see the Far 
East without its glamour," ^2 but with no 
loss of admiration. He had seen Japan 
holding her own against the world in the 
war with China, the enthusiasm of the 
nation concentrated and silent ; and he 
had come to the conclusion that the day of 
Western influence was over. Whatever 
" the limitations of personal individuality 
among the Japanese," it is his belief that " as 
a nation Japan possesses an individuality- 
much stronger than our own." He tells 
the story of the girl Yuko who offered up 
her life that the sorrow of the Emperor 

»2 0. 326. 

61 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

might cease, on the occasion of the attack 
on the Czarevitch. She cut her throat 
after binding her girdle tightly above her 
knees, because " the daughter of a Samurai 
must be found in death with limbs decently 
composed " ; and the Ministers whispered : 
" All else will change ; but the heart of 
the nation will not change." ^^ What he 
calls " the vague but immeasurable emotion 
of Shinto " has grasped him, and he 
embodies it in the character of one of his 
pupils departing for the war, who told him 
of a military excursion in his last year at 
school : " We marched to a shrine in the 
district of lu, where the spirits of heroes 
are worshipped. It is a beautiful lonesome 
place, among hills ; and the temple is 
shadowed by very high trees. It is always 
dim and cool and silent there. We drew 
up before the shrine in military order ; 
nobody spoke. Then the bugle sounded 
through the holy grove, like a call to 
battle ; and we all presented arms ; and the 
tears came to my eyes — I do not know 
why." 34 . . . He concluded that only half- 
education could tempt this people to 



" 0. 341. "4 o. 298. 
62 



i 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

" servile imitation of Western ways." He 
made some slips, as when he said that the 
typical woman in Japanese romance never 
appears as " a sentimental maiden, dying, 
or making others die, for love " ; 35 ^ slip 
which he corrected by several stories in 
later books. But as a rule he spoke with 
great accuracy and weight. He showed 
that the religion, the morality, and the art 
of the Japanese were " evolved out of 
ancestral habits, customs, ethics, beliefs, 
directly the opposite of our own in some 
cases, and in all cases strangely different," 
and not to be molested without damage to 
one party or to both. He went farther, 
and in the matter of art, for example, 
expressed the opinion that the Japanese 
art would, in an appreciative and un- 
prejudiced mind, modify " almost every 
pre-existing sentiment in relation to the 
beautiful." After school hours he used to 
go up into an old village cemetery and look 
at the stone Buddha smiling " the smile 
of one who has received an injury not to be 
resented," 3* and the contrast between this 
and the utilitarian modern college'^ below 
" 0. 92. 3 6 Q^ 53^ 

63 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

set up a dialogue in his mind between East 
and West. Science speaks for the West 
of the Cosmos, resolved into a nebula, 
recondensing to form another swarm of 
worlds on which reappears the same pea- 
sant and his ox and plough as before. 
Buddhism replies that this same peasant 
in Japan knows and has long known what 
the East has " mathematically discovered," 
and has been taught something of his 
" innumerable faiths, and of the apparition 
and disparition of universes and of the 
unity of life." 3' The West speaks of the per- 
petual record of " the least of human 
thoughts." The East knows more, and 
the man has been taught " that the thoughts 
and acts of each being projected beyond the 
individual existence, shape other lives 
unborn," and taught " to control his most 
secret wishes, because of their immeasurable 
inherent potentialities " ; and Hearn tells 
a story of a dead woman who haunted a 
place and was blamed, even by those who 
pitied her, because " she should have 
known that anger, secretly indulged, can 
have ghostly consequences." ^s Having 

»» O. 168. " 0. 176, 
64 



1 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

spoken of his own conclusion that " we 
have no possible refuge but in ourselves," 
he quotes the revelation of Buddha : "Be 
ye lamps unto yourselves ; be ye a refuge 
unto yourselves. . . . Look not for refuge 
to any beside yourselves." ^^ 

Kokoro belongs to 1896, and is of the 
same substance as Out of the East. Shinto- 
ism and the religious emotion which is one 
with patriotism and family piety fasci- 
nate him. He compares with the Western 
man, insensible to the past, the Japanese 
uttering the Shinto prayer : " Ye fore- 
fathers of the generations, and of our fami- 
lies, and of our kindred — ^unto you, the 
founders of our houses, we utter the glad- 
ness of our thanks." But it must be re- 
membered that Hearn knew far more about 
the domestic life of Japan than of England 
or the United States. His comparisons 
are sometimes rash and seldom necessary : 
his fine expressions of Japanese ideals and 
realities are effective without comparisons. 
In " Japanese Civilization " he dwells upon 
the lightness and mobility of Japanese life, 
the impermanence of things, the lack of 
3» o. 181. 

65 E 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

encumbrances and of " egotistical indi- 
vidualism." Shinto has taught the indi- 
vidual to think of Emperor and country 
before family and self : Buddhism, " to i 
master regret, to endure pain, and to accept 
as eternal law the vanishing of things loved 
and the tyranny of things hated." ^^ He 
tells how he saw by accident the relaxed 
face of a male servant who had long seemed ; 
happy : " Hard lines of pain and anger 
appeared in it, making it some twenty years ; 
older " ; but at a warning cough the man 
was rejuvenated. It is no wonder that in 
" A Glimpse of Tendencies " he declares that 
the barriers between East and West " of ' 
racial feeling, of emotional differentiation, 
of language, of manners and beliefs, are 
likely to remain unsurmountable for cen- 
turies." Nevertheless, he imagines an 
approaching of East and West, producing 
a Western religion which should combine 
synthetic philosophy and Buddhism, and 
** differing from Buddhism mainly in the 
greater exactness of its conceptions " : ^ 
and again : "A Buddhism strongly fortified 
by Western science will meet the future needs 



" K. 36. "i K. 244. 

66 



i 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

of the race." ^'^ He, at least, like Maeterlinck, 
does not dread the disintegration of the 
Ego after death on which Buddhism and 
science insist : " Rather than an end to be 
feared," he says, " the dissolution of self 
is the one object of all objects to which 
our efforts should be turned." He repeats 
that " the soft serenity " and " passionless 
tenderness " ^^ of the face of Ruddha might 
yet give peace of soul to the West. The 
Shinto idea that " the world of the living is 
directly governed by the world of the 
dead " ^^ was beginning to haunt him. 
Spencer had helped him to it, as may be 
seen in "From a Travelling Diary,"*^ where 
he quotes from Spencer that first love is 
" absolutely antecedent to all relative ex- 
perience." It was to become a literary 
obsession to Hearn, if not what it was to 
the Japanese with whom " the constant 
presence of the dead has been a matter of 
conviction for thousands of years/' This 
book is not all philosophical, though it is 
more so than Out of the East. Even the 
stories in it are directly useful as illustra- 

« K. 193, 
«" K, 221. ** K, 268. « K. 59, 

67 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

tions of Japanese ideas. Such is the story 
of a boy of seven who saved his father from i 
a tyrant by showing a severed head which i 
he pretended to be his father's, and after : 
saluting it reverently, cut out his own i 
bowels in grief to make the deception com- 
plete. There is no longer much question 
of style. He writes with lucidity, preci- 
sion and flow, now and then returning to ; 
his old ways and writing : " These things i 
make appeal extraordinary to emotional I 
life," or " there is a cavernous world tre- 
mendous,^^ *^ or " a limpid magnificence of (; 
light indescribable.^^ These were temporary! 
indulgences of a sober man who was too ; 
busy to try to write better than he was born i 
to do. This mature style was not one:i 
which he would have been proud of tenii 
years before, for it owed much of its indi- 
viduality to these occasional slips ; but it 
was sufficient and without pretension. 

Gleanings from Buddha Fields, published 
in 1897 but ^vritten before he came to 
Tokyo, is continued from its two prede- 
cessors. He returns in " Nirvana " to his ^ 
opinion that because Buddhism in many»| 

" K. 16 n, 
68 



LAFCADiO HEARN 

ways appeals to Western reason it offers us 
" larger religious possibilities — the sugges- 
tions of a universal scientific creed nobler 
than any which has ever existed," ^7 Light,he 
says, is " offered from the East." In " Notes 
of a Trip to Kyoto," however, he finds 
one source of " the contentment and simple 
happiness of Japanese common life " in 
the cheapness of pleasure, " creating 
the beautiful out of nothing," ^ really 
enjoying landscapes and the sight of ani- 
mals, insects, and flowers : in the essay 
" In Osaka " he finds another reason for it 
in the Japanese " birthright " of taste. 
His chief business is still with description 
and exposition of what he has learnt about 
Japanese life, art, and religion, in essays on 
the city of Osaka, on " Buddhist Allusions in 
Japanese Folk-song," and so on. Except in 
language he is often hardly English at all, 
so transparent a medium does he make 
of himself for the visible and invisible 
Japanese world. It is true that to the end 
he could not read a Japanese newspaper 
and could only just write a letter home,** 
but as Professor Chamberlain says : " Laf' 

*' B. F. 265. " B. F. 60. " B. II. 486, 
69 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

cadio Hearn understands contemporary 
Japan better and makes us understand it 
better, than any other writer, because he 
loves it better " ; so and Mr. Noguchi states 
that in all his books there is not one mis- 
spelling of a Japanese word. ^^ He is most 
individual when he submits to his favourite 
obsession, that of the infinite ancestry of 
every soul and every act. In " Dust " 
it is the inspiration of a thin rapture of the 
intellect. " We are," he says, " each and 
all, infinite compounds of fragments of 
anterior lives." ^2 His mind is not " a king- 
dom " but " a fantastical republic, daily 
troubled by more revolutions than ever 
occurred in South America," and he ex- 
claims : " I, an individual ; an individual 
soul ! Nay, I am a population — a popula- 
tion unthinkable for multitude, even by 
groups of a thousand millions ! Genera- 
tions of generations I am, seons of aeons ! 
Countless times the concourse now making 
me has been scattered, and mixed with 
other scatterings. Of what concern, then, 
the next disintegration ? Perhaps, after 
trillions of ages of burning in different 

«« T. J. 65. 5' N. V. " B. F. 92. 

70 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

dynasties, the very best of me may come 
together again." 

Whether this idea preyed upon him, or 
whether it was simply his dishke of a great 
modern city, he was not at ease writing in 
Tokyo in 1897. He complained that he 
got " no thrill, no frisson, no sensation," 
that " the Holy Ghost had departed " 
from him : or perhaps, he says, " the 
power to feel thrill dies with the approach 
of a man's fiftieth year." He felt his work 
to be poor, though it had improved by 
re-writing. He was referring to the " Retro- 
spectives " in Exotics and Retrospectives 
of 1898. He had got back to himself again, 
after the long period when the novelty, the 
charm, and the abundance in Japanese life 
had taken him out of himself and supported 
him. His work is now more and more a 
collection of short sketches, reflections, 
and stories, quite distinct from one another, 
not only in Exotics and Retrospectives, but 
in the successive books, Ghostly Japan 
(1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese 
Miscellany (1901), Kotto (1902), Kwaidan 
(1904), and the posthumous Milky Way 
(1905). The stories increase in number ; 
71 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

Kwaidan contains little else. When he 
writes anything beyond the length of a very 
short essay or story it is a string of notes 
and quotations like " Japanese Buddhist 
Proverbs " in Ghostly Japan, " Japanese 
Female Names " in Shadowings, " Songs of 
Japanese Children " in the Miscellany. 
For many of these he had the valuable help 
of his pupil, Mr Otani, as collector. It is 
to be noticed that of all the books published 
between 1898 and 1904, only three chapters 
had already appeared in American maga- 
zines, which had hitherto printed a con- 
siderable portion of Hearn's essays. As 
early as 1893 he had said that an inspiration 
or strong emotion was impossible in Japan : 
that all his work had to be forced. In 1895 
he added that writing was the only antidote 
to " vexation and anger and imaginings 
and recollections of unpleasant things said 
or done." He describes how he wrote every- 
thing at first " hurriedly without care," ^3 
and then re-wrote four or five times, letting 
the thought " define and crystallize it- 
self." The concluding paragraphs of his 
chapter on dragonflies in Kotto was re- 

" B. III. 42. 

72 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

written seventeen times. He looked back 
at his early florid writing with shame, and 
found himself " forced to study simpli- 
city," 54 though at first he was alarmed at 
the " lack of colour " in his Japanese 
writing ; he was forty-three but felt his 
style " not yet fixed — ^too artificial." This 
self-criticism is just, though it may be 
doubted whether it helped or hindered 
him ; for his writing often suggests that 
little good save neatness was gained by his 
labours. But the instinct, or the old habit 
of his Gautier period, was very strong, and 
he could not help " polishing up " ^^ passages 
in his letters. That he had a disturbing 
consciousness of the character of words 
would be clear from one sentence in a letter 
of 1892, speaking of architecture : " Gothic 
is soul — or better Spirit, using the sharp- 
angled flame word." He had long kept 
note books for " every sensation or idea," 
every " new and strong impression," and 
classified them. Yet he knew well that 
" our best work is out of the unconscious." 
For some writers the unconscious is strong 
and full in the first and only form of a book 

" B. III. 62. ^' B. III. 291. 

73 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

or chapter ; for others, doubtless, only in 
the third or tenth revision. There is, 
however, a danger to those who are over- 
much impressed by Flaubert's sweating and 
grunting at literature, that they may think 
the seventeenth revision in any case better 
than the sixteenth. It is certain that 
much of Hearn's elaboration ended in 
rhetoric which leaves us cold and even with- 
out admiration. Such is the " Revery " 
in Kotto. In these later essays he is less 
mastered by his subjects and has leisure to 
elaborate very small things. He had time 
to use words like " pulchritude," and to 
speak of " the enormity of day " in igno- 
rance or rash carelessness of the customary 
meaning of the word " enormity " ; ^^ he still 
thought Pierre Loti " the world's greatest 
prose writer." s' In " Incense " he re- 
turned to his love of precious catalogues. 
These are little things, but the important 
point is that the essays and reveries in 
which they occur, like " Azure Psychology," 
" Parfum de Jeunesse," " Nightmare 
Touch," leave us unmoved and therefore 
free to observe trifles which would be lost 

66 E. and R. 234. " S. 88. 

74 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

in the sweep of a powerful thought or emo- 
tion. In " Vespertina Cognitio," e.g., there 
is nothing to bhnd us to the absurdity of 
" The stealthy step approached, — but 
with lentor malevolently measured.'''' Is it 
possible that a word like " lentor " could 
haunt a man who was born to write well ? 
The writing has the appearance of being a 
quite conscious decoration of a subject of 
which the writer has exaggerated the im- 
portance to himself. Even the thought of 
the past living in the present, though it 
may have genuinely haunted Hearn, is 
introduced time after time with ineffectual 
monotony, as at the conclusion of " Fire- 
flies " in Kotto. It is less a haunting idea 
than a trick, and it has perhaps become so 
through being used too deliberately. The 
childish reminiscences are injured in the 
same way. The desire to impress is too 
obvious for the reader to feel the power. 

From the " Retrospectives " in these 
volumes it is a pleasure to turn to the 
stories and to the essays of pure informa- 
tion. Some of the stories he calls " only 
curios," and they are told definitely to 
" illustrate some strange beliefs." If he 
75 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

only fulfilled this purpose they must live 
long. But he does very much more. He 
gives us a large number of stories, weird, 
romantic, heroic, and horrible, all of 
them with the fascination of strangeness 
and yet made perfectly intelligible to Eng- 
lish readers. Some are from books, some 
from oral sources. It will be long before 
we know how much of them Hearn contri- 
buted. To some he may have added little 
or nothing. His great achievement is 
harmony of tone ; his additions are not 
noticeable. To a stranger they seem per- 
fectly Japanese, though this may only be a 
way of saying that they are pure Lafcadio 
Hearn. They read like the most delicate 
and modest of translations, whether he is 
translating or not. Thus " Of a Promise 
Kept," in the Miscellany, seems a good 
translation of a perfect story, which illus- 
trates Japanese belief and character in a 
vivid way. One brother going a long jour- 
ney promises to be back by a certain day 
when " the chrysanthemums will be in 
bloom and we can go together to look at 
them." When that day arrived, they pre- 
pared a feast. As the evening grew and 
76 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

the traveller had not returned, the mother 
went to bed. The brother kept a look out 
but was about to re-enter the house for 
the last time when he saw a tall man — yes ! 
his brother, Akana. He came in and sat 
down, but touched neither food nor wine. 
He explained his lateness. He had been 
kept back forcibly by a cousin at the com- 
mand of a tyrannical lord. He had hoped 
to escape from the castle in time, but 
" until to-day " he could not find a way. 
His brother was incredulous, for it was two 
hundred and fifty miles away. " Yes," 
he answered, but a soul can go a thousand 
leagues a day, and he had been allowed to 
keep his sword. " Thus only was I able to 
come to you. ... Be good to our mother." 
Then he disappeared. The brother went 
to the castle and killed the treacherous 
cousin in the midst of his family, and es- 
caped alive because the lord admired the 
friendship and courage of the two men. 
The " curios " of Kotto, the " Stories from 
Strange Books " in Shadowings, the tales 
scattered through Ghostly Japan and almost 
filling Kwaidan, certainly make up one of 
the greatest treasures ever found by a 
77 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

translator in an utterly foreign land. Their 
beauty, their splendour, tenderness or 
horror is not to be denied, whether readers 
care much or nothing for Japan. Most are 
told without any interruption from the 
translator, and exist by themselves, with 
just that slight something absent which 
suggests the translation from a remote 
language. A few, like the " Story of 
Divination," in Ghostly Japan, are intro- 
duced by Hearn in person. This story, 
e.g., was taken from an old fortune-teller 
whom he knew — a man with " a love of 
independence as savage as a gypsy's " who 
would never stay more than two days at a 
time with Hearn. The story is of a famous 
fortune-teller living in a mountain hut 
with a tile for a pillow. One day a rat 
wakened him and he flung the tile at it and 
broke it. As he was reproaching himself 
he saw writing exposed by the fracture in 
the tile, saying : "In the year of the Hare 
in the fourth month, on the seventeenth 
day, at the Hour of the Serpent, this tile, 
after serving as a pillow, will be thrown at 
a rat and broken." He discovered the seal 
and name of the maker, and seeking him 
78 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

out learnt that an old fortune-teller had 
written the characters in the clay. He 
went in search of this man but arrived to 
hear that he was just dead. The visitor 
was, however, not unexpected, and at that 
very hour. A book had been left for him 
and in it he read about a treasure hidden 
near his own hut. He found it and became 
a very wealthy man. As to Hearn's old 
friend, he was found dead in the snow, 
standing erect at the foot of a pine upon the 
mountains ; and Hearn remembered the 
Japanese saying : " The fortune-teller 
knows not his own fate." ^^ The style of 
these stories, translations or not, is never, 
or practically never, disfigured by signs of 
uninspired labour like the essays : in them 
he has learnt to sacrifice the part to the 
whole. It is a plain, lucid, unnoticeable 
style, a little stiff and lacking in movement 
and natural continuity, but for the most 
part leaving the reader free to listen to 
speeches and watch events. 

The informing essays are almost equally 
good of their kind, though they make room 
occasionally for phrases like that in the 

" Q. J. 49. 
79 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

description of a street of shops, " full 
of toys indescribable — dainty puerilities, 
fragile astonishments, laughter - making 
oddities." ^^ He is a little stiff in his manner, 
saying, for example : " Before speaking 
further of the poetical literature of semi, I 
must attempt a few remarks about the 
s6mi themselves." ^° The Miscellany is full 
of interesting and often charming things, 
as in the " Songs of Japanese Children," 
songs relating to weather and sky and ani- 
mals, play songs, narratives, and lullabies : 
or as in the " Dragonflies," where he gives 
many examples of tiny poems suggested by 
dragonflies, such as that famous one : 
" Catching dragonflies — I wonder where 
he has gone to-day " (the words uttered by 
a mother thinking of a dead child who 
used to play at catching dragonflies). 
It is the custom to write poems for a con- 
solation in trouble, and in Kotto Hearn 
quotes several by a simple woman of the 
people, as they occur in a diary of her 
married life which he is translating. These 
essays of information, with their notes, 
touch so many different matters in so many 
»• E. and R. 40. "o S. 78. 
80 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

different ways that a knowledge of them 
would mean a deep knowledge of Japan. 
The " Japanese Buddhist Proverbs," e.g., 
are richer in suggestion than some of 
Hearn's rhapsodical meditations in achieve- 
ment ; and this is a comparison which can 
fairly be made, say in the case of the 
proverb : " Even the touching of sleeves 
in passing is caused by some relation in a 
future life." *^ After some of these pro- 
verbs it is not easy to enjoy his rapture 
upon the belief that " all being is One. 
One I felt myself to be with the thrilling 
of breeze and the racing of wave — ^with 
every flutter of shadow and flicker of sun — 
with the azure of sky and sea — ^with the 
great green bush of the land " ; 62 Q^e with 
the fire, for he asks : " Have you never, 
when looking at some great burning, found 
yourself exulting with remorse in the 
triumph and glory of fire." ^^ . . . " Beside 
the Sea " in the Miscellany shows us that 
in spite of his rapture about the One he 
could still be very tender over " the poor 
dead " and could not convince himself 
" that even the grosser substance of van- 

81 Q. J. 191. «2 Kot. 182. «» E. and R. 180. 
81 F 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

ished being ever completely dies, however 
dissolved or scattered — ^fleeting in the gale 
— floating in the mists," etc. 

In 1903 he was writing a series of chap- 
ters on Japan " from the standpoint of 
ancestor- worship." At first he thought to 
use them as lectures in the United States, 
but in 1904 they were published under the 
title of " Japan : an attempt at inter- 
pretation." He was afraid of the " real 
sociologist's " opinion ; thinking that he 
ought to stick to " birds and cats, insects 
and flowers, and queer small things " ; and 
certainly it needed a superhuman effort for 
a man who saw the multitudes of little 
things from close at hand, to try to see the 
proportioned whole. Fortunately the book 
is substantial enough not to depend entirely 
upon breadth of view. For he put into it 
the main results of his reading of Japanese 
life and books, and made it probably the 
best single book, not a work of reference, 
upon Japan. He begins by recognizing 
the charm of a land where " every relation 
appears to be governed by altruism, every 
action directed by duty, and every object 
shaped by art," where " for no little time 
82 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

these fairy folk can give you all the soft 
bliss of sleep." ^* His business is with the 
nation which has " entered into the world's 
political struggle " ; but in " The Higher 
Buddhism " he again points out that " some 
Buddhist ideas offer the most startling 
analogy with the evolutional ideas of our 
own time," and also that there is no scien- 
tific counterpart to the belief that thoughts 
and deeds affect not only the next rebirth 
but " the nature of worlds yet unevolved, 
wherein, after innumerable cycles, you 
may have to live again." He makes also 
the personal statement that Spencer helped 
him to see in Buddhist philosophy more 
than a romantic interest.^s jje is, however, 
more often concerned with Shinto. He 
shows us the development of the well-con- 
ducted family where the daily life " repre- 
sents religion in the best and purest sense," 
united under the blessed shadow of an- 
cestors, " the makers and teachers of the 
present." He suggests that three thou- 
sand years ago life in a Greek city was 
severe and cheerful, much like this Japanese 
life. And the family piety extends and 

«* J, 18. «6 J. 232. 
83 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

by a natural process becomes " the loyalty 
that prays for seven successive lives to lay 
down on behalf of the sovereign." ^^ In 
obedience to an imperial order the nation 
offered itself up to a reconstruction which 
has made it within thirty years formidable 
among " modern civilized powers." This 
power she owed to " the moral habit de- 
rived from her ancient cult — ^the religion 
of the ancestors " ^' — a religion which was 
inseparable from government and tradi- 
tional ideas. He forecasted that Russia 
would have to fear this power more than 
repeating rifles :^^ he also expressed a fear 
lest success in a struggle with Russia 
should give Japan confidence to allow ■; 
right of land tenm'e to foreigners, by means 
of which foreign capital, he thought, must! 
triumph, and the country be lost. " Be- 
hind her military capacity," he explains, 
" is the disciplined experience of a thousand 
years ; behind her industrial and com- 
mercial power, the experience of half a cen- 
tury." «' This, however, is a purely scientific 
argument and may well be overthrown by 
the greater subtlety of facts. He shows at . 

^^ J. 58. «' J. 412. «« J. 507. «» J. 510. I 
84 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

what a cost — to Western eyes — this dis- 
cipHned power has been achieved. For 
example, a man's house is not " his castle," 
for to close it would be to insult the com- 
munity. There is no privacy, and " the 
slightest divergence from rule," '" is frowned 
on. But on the other hand the community 
has a voice in more than daily conduct. 
For example, the principal of a college 
" holds his office only on the condition that 
his rule gives satisfaction to a majority of 
the students." 'i When Hearn was dis- 
missed from the University there was an 
attempted agitation among the students to 
reinstate him. The same force forbids 
competition. Even the swift jinrikisha- 
man may not pass the weak and slow, or if 
he dares to, the angry appeal to him may be 
translated, says Hearn : " This is a hard 
calling ; and our lives would be made 
harder than they are, if there were no rules 
to prevent selfish competition." '^ But 
while admiring this, Hearn sees an impass- 
able gulf between it and the European 
civilization with " unlimited individual 
right " to starve or purchase a peerage. 

'« J. 112. " J. 437. " J. 440. 
85 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

Hearn saw the horrors of this free society, 
but dreaded Socialism, which he called a 
" reversion toward the primitive conditions 
of human society." '^ He foresaw centuries 
of effort needed to burst '* the fetters which 
Socialism now seeks to impose on human 
society." ^* He foresaw " a democracy 
more brutal than any Spartan oligarchy " ; '^ 
within twenty years (of 1904) a man would 
only write what he was told : '* and this he 
confused with Socialism. As for Japan he 
held it to be obvious that " any society 
where ethical traditions forbid the indi- 
vidual to profit at the cost of his fellow* 
men will be placed at an enormous dis- 
advantage when faced with the industrial 
struggle for existence against communities 
whose self-government permits of the widest 
possible freedom, and the widest range of 
competitive enterprise." ''' In this he is 
supported by a letter from Spencer (quoted 
in an appendix) offering to a Japanese 
statesman the advice to keep Americans 
and Europeans " as much as possible at 
arm's length," to forbid, for example, the 

" J. 279. '* B. II. 184. 

" B. II. 205. •« B. II. 512. " J. 279. 

86 



Si 

r 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

intermarriage of foreigners and Japanese, 
and this on the ground that " the result is 
inevitably a bad one in the long run." 
Hearn follows with a concluding comment 
saying that " in another generation Japan 
will be able, without peril, to abandon much 
of her conservatism ; but, for the time 
being, her conservatism is her salvation." '^ 
He just lived to see the sure promise of her 
triumph over Russia, and to record in one 
of his last essays " the joyous tone of public 
confidence " — " the playful confidence " — 
" the admirably restrained pride of the 
nation in its victories." '^^ He died on 
September 28, 1904. The " Interpreta- 
tion " can only be judged by sociologists 
and by the greatest of them, Time. It 
was an extraordinary effort — ^Mrs. Hearn 
tells us of his long struggles — to express 
what one man could not possibly grasp, 
especially one who knew, as he said himself, 
enough about Japan to know that he laiew 
nothing. He did violence to himself by 
the asceticism of subduing for the purpose 
of this book a great part of himself and of 
what he had taken to be himself. The 

'» J. 534. '9 M. W. 183. 

87 



tAFCADIO HEARN 

most he allows himself is a catalogue now 
and then and a brief picture of a dance or 
of a scene from the wOd Old coast — " the 
naked figure of a young fisherman erect 
at the prow of his boat, clapping his hands 
in salutation to the rising sun, whose 
ruddy glow transformed him into a statue of 
bronze." ^° There is perhaps not a single 
example in the book of his characteristic 
bad writing, though in The Milky' Way 
he showed himself still capable of using 
" facile " simply as a synonym for " easy." 
But the book is more than the marvellous 
tour de force of a writer about " cats and 
birds and little things." His other books 
give scattered impressions, this an abstract 
of them arranged and extended under the 
guidance of a scientific spirit ; and it is hard 
to imagine a better book which is neither 
a cyclopaedia nor a traveller's bird's-eye 
view. Hearn knew too much and was too 
sober for the bird's-eye view and was un- 
prepared to immolate himself in a cyclo- 
paedia ; but his compromise, taken with 
the stories, the studies, the impressions, 
and the articles of pure information, pre- 

80 J. 152. 
88 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

sents a marvellously detailed picture which 
is yet always and everywhere alive. The 
personality of the writer is in his best work 
shown by his abnegation of personality, 
though this was probably due to no con- 
scious effort : the effort was needed rather 
to obtrude it. We can perhaps never be 
sure whether he really had reconciled in his 
heart, as a French critic has said, the science 
of the West and the religion of the East ; 
but his books set them side by side or 
inextricably mingled in a manner both 
useful and attractive. No one has done 
more to " remind Europe of the importance 
of Eastern civilization." Professor Cham- 
berlain testified to the " scientific accuracy 
of detail " and the " tender and exquisite 
brilliancy of style," in these pictures of 
" Japanese life, manners, thoughts, aspira- 
tions, the student-class, the singing girls, 
the politicians . . . not men only but 
ghosts and folk-lore fancies, the scenery of 
remote islands which Hearn alone among 
Europeans has ever trod," ^^ everything in 
fact, except " the humorous side of native 
life " : to expect humour from so solitary 

" T. J. 65. 

89 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

and pitiful a man would be unreasonable. 
Mr. Yone Noguchi says that the Japanese 
were " regenerated by his sudden magic, 
and baptized afresh under his transcen- 
dental rapture ; in fact, the old romances 
which we had forgotten ages ago were 
brought again to quiver in the ear, and the 
ancient beauty which we buried under the 
dust rose again with a strange yet new splen- 
dour ; " 82 an(j ijg foresees that Hearn's 
books will be an inspiration in Japanese 
literature. He became, says Mr. Noguchi, 
a Japanese writer, and I sometimes feel 
that with Japanese writers he should be 
compared. The material in which he 
worked is still so foreign to most of us that 
it is not easy to say how much is his in the 
stories, for example, which are his finest 
work. I have said that they are like 
choice translations. He has been accused 
of submitting himself in a passiveness more 
pure than wise to Japanese influence ; 
but the blind minnow cannot assume the 
colour of its environment. Personality of 
the vivid militant kind is just now wor- 
shipped, and the silver grey is hidden 

" N. 17. 
90 



LAFCADIO HEARN 

from us. Some day it may be discovered 
that what we think is Japanese in his 
work is really Hearn, shorn of his French 
romanticism. Certainly he has either im- 
posed on us a personal impression of 
Japanese things not the less deep for its 
delicacy, or he has made himself a mirror 
in a manner unapproached by other 
observers of foreign countries. To impute 
observation to his maturest work is an 
insult ; he had become the thing observed : 
he was a Japanese writer " in perfect accord 
with the sweet glamour of Old Japan," ^^ 
to use again the words of Mr. Noguchi, 
whose fine Japanese mind has not been 
clouded by the acquisition of a beautiful 
English style. 

" N. 5. 



Biilier & Tanner, Frome anJ Loudon. 



WORKS BY 

LAFCADIO HEARN. 



The Romance of the Milky Way and other Studies 

and Stories. Crown 8vo., 5s. net. 

" The book is full of "prettiness . . . not a page is without its charm 
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Letters from the Raven. The Correspondence of 

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duction by Milton Bronner. Illustrated. Crown 8vo, 
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" The book is a pleasant one, attractively commemorative of a highly 
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Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. Edited by Eliza- 
beth BisLAND. 2 vols. Illustrated. Demy 8vo., 24s. net. 

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The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. Edited by 

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This collection of the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn contains the 
fullest expression of his temperament, his views on life, methods of 
work, etc. The volume is fully illustrated, in part from Heam's own 
sketches of Japanese scenes, and uniform with the " Life and Letters 
of Lafcadio Heam." 

" The book is a rare feast for readers who are fond of a good letter 
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" The charm and fancy and humour which illumine these admirable 
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London : CONSTABLE & COMPANY, Ltd. 

91 

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